Posted by justinlee_24 on 9/8/2013 1:24:00 AM (view original):Looks like Schwartz might actually win his own tourney this time... he's opened up a commanding 9 game lead over Brianjw and every single one of his teams has won at least 60 games.

A couple of 2-4 and 1-5 sessions in a row, and just like that, the 9-game lead is gone.

Well, one thing I've determined this year is that my teams are very streaky. Luckily, the good streaks have outnumber the bad streaks, but here is a sampling of my year so far.

The key to long term success in this tournament is to avoid the 0-6, 1-5 and 2-4 sessions. Two of my first three sessions were 2-4. Then my teams went 15 straight sessions without a session worse than 3-3 (51-39 stretch).

Then three of my next six sessions were worse than 3-3, but that was immediately followed by a run of 4-6-4-6-4-6-5. A short time later, I put together 23 straight sessions without going worse than 3-3 (87-51 stretch).

After a mixture of 2's, 3's and 4's, I went on another really hot streak, 6,5,6,2,4,4,4,4,4,5,4,4,5 to reach a high-water mark of .627 winning percentage.

Then, I hit my worst stretch of the year... 1,2,4,2,1,1 (11-25), but I've rebounded a bit the last two sessions.

Posted by schwarze on 9/14/2013 10:14:00 AM (view original):Well, one thing I've determined this year is that my teams are very streaky. Luckily, the good streaks have outnumber the bad streaks, but here is a sampling of my year so far.

The key to long term success in this tournament is to avoid the 0-6, 1-5 and 2-4 sessions. Two of my first three sessions were 2-4. Then my teams went 15 straight sessions without a session worse than 3-3 (51-39 stretch).

Then three of my next six sessions were worse than 3-3, but that was immediately followed by a run of 4-6-4-6-4-6-5. A short time later, I put together 23 straight sessions without going worse than 3-3 (87-51 stretch).

After a mixture of 2's, 3's and 4's, I went on another really hot streak, 6,5,6,2,4,4,4,4,4,5,4,4,5 to reach a high-water mark of .627 winning percentage.

Then, I hit my worst stretch of the year... 1,2,4,2,1,1 (11-25), but I've rebounded a bit the last two sessions.

Even if we could compile all those stats, it might not be the most important kind of luck. According to Baseball Prospectus, this year's Detroit Tigers are super unlucky, but not in ways that show up in any of these measures. They are just not getting the run differential you'd expect from their component stats. By component stats for and against, they are playing as well as a 110-win team! But they are only going to end up with 90-something wins because, I guess, they are stranding a bunch of runners and their opponents aren't.

Yes, I'm familiar with this phenomenon. Another word that I've heard used is "Cluster-Luck".... the ability to cluster hits together to produce more runs than the same number of hits would normally produce given a random distribution.

So first step is to calculate expected runs scored (and allowed), based on the component stats, then use those numbers to calculate expected winning %. Note sure I have enough data to calculate the expected runs allowed for pitchers.

I'm sure it isn't easy to compile, but WiS does give you inside a league the AVG/OBP/SLG for pitchers, which is interesting to measure against team earned runs allowed. But I don't know a good way to put it together.

I'll join in for the sake of being able to whine a little. My 80M has done well by these measures, but the rest of my teams have performed marginally at best. My 90M team easily has the worst actual win% of any theme team I've ever owned. Their performance is simply horrific in all three of these categories. If I don't make round two, it will be easy for me to point to that as a major reason why.

I've basically had tons of good luck, with the very partial exception of my 90M team. I'm slightly underperforming Pythagorean, but that should be true of everyone who doesn't run into fatigue death spiral. The 24 games over .500 among 1-run games isn't really sustainable.

My hopes are dashed. In the past 20 games I have gone from 3 playoff teams to likely 1 - large wildcard leads have been blown as my teams have sunk into the abyss. I was close to 40 games above .500 overall and now were are at exactly .500 after all these games. Oh well, there is always next season.